Closer Look at the Center for Election Science

The Center for Election Science is one of few nonprofits in the U.S. that focuses on voting methods—and we do it better than anyone. Election reform has focused almost exclusively on issues like the right to vote, campaign finance, election fraud, and, to a lesser extent, ballot access. It’s not that we don’t appreciate other election-related issues. We do. But we put voting methods at the top.

Approval Voting Example

You can take the world where you get everything you want except superior voting methods. But it’s not a good place. You wind up with worse winners and an inaccurate measure of support from the remaining candidates. Democracy deserves better. Unfortunately, voters often believe that ignoring favorites is intrinsic to elections. It’s not, we just happen to use a bad method. At The Center for Election Science, we believe that being able to vote for your favorite candidate is one of the most important parts of voting.

Bringing more honesty to voting is one of the many reasons we promote Approval Voting. What’s Approval Voting? Simply choose all the candidates you prefer (no ranking). Most votes wins. That’s it. You can always vote your honest favorite. Want to tactically hedge your bets against more competitive candidates? You can do that too—all at the same time.

When elections go awry, we let you know why, whether it’s from our vote-for-one Plurality, a ranking method, or even a runoff. And, most importantly, we’ll remind you that there are solutions.

Don’t forget. Just because government elections tend to use poor methods doesn’t mean you have to. Part of our mission is to help improve democracy for everyone, even at the organization level. We’re in the business of making democracy both smart and easy. So check us out at www.electology.org.

About Aaron Hamlin

Aaron Hamlin is the executive director and co-founder of The Center for Election Science. He's been consulted on voting procedures for small to large organizations and publicly elected officials in several states. He's been published in numerous outlets and has been invited as an expert speaker at conferences across the country. Aaron is also a licensed attorney with additional graduate degrees from Indiana University and Miami University. Checkout the rest of our international team of authors as well. Together, they help cover free and fair elections on every continent with a focus on election reform in the United States.

Comments

I agree that being able to support your favorite is by far the most important requirement for a voting system, and is the essential thing that is missing from our current voting system (Plurality).

Yes, honesty in voting is essential. Without it, when voters have to abandon what they most want, voting becomes a joke, and elections become a farce. …and the result is made into nonsense that has no relation to what people want.

With Approval, everyone can fully support all that they like, all that they’d want–which of course will always include their favorite.

Approval elects the candidate liked, wanted, trusted by the most people.

That would be so different from what we have now, that it would result in societal improvement that really isn’t even imaginable now, when people are used to holding their nose to vote for what they least dislike. Voting would be hopeful and positivea, rather than resigned, cowed and dismal.

That societal improvement would be gotten by just adding two words to the ballot:

Where it now says “Vote for 1″, it would instead say “Approve 1 or more”.

Plurality’s requrement to bottom-rate all but one of the candidates amounts to a requirement to falsify your relative ratings of the candidates, resulting in many or most peoples’ ballots being falsified.

That could qualify as a basis for a voting-rights court case against Plurality.

And I too, recommend Approval as the best proposal to replace Plurality.

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One important thing to remember is that the meaning of words – what they come to signify – needs to be understood in context. Meaning is always part of specific social and theoretical dynamics that condition the sense we give to words.

Permitted demonstrators from the LaRouche Political Action Committee came equipped with a chorus singing “The Battle Cry of Freedom”, ending with the Star Spangled Banner, on Thursday in front of Federal Hall in New York City